


Googleplex

by speakingwosound (sev313)



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 13:16:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16198280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sev313/pseuds/speakingwosound
Summary: "At Google, we count seniority in feet from the cereal bar.”Dan snorts. "We count seniority in feet from the Oval Office."





	Googleplex

"Can you drive straighter?" Dan asks, reaching out to snatch a briefing book as it rolls off the giant pile on his lap before belatedly adding, "please."

"It's the potholes," the driver says, slowly, glancing through the rearview mirror. "You work for the President?"

Dan takes the top of his pen off with his teeth and draws a thick line through the entire first paragraph of a speech he's editing. His voice is garbled around the plastic. "Obviously."

The driver nods sagely. "You should fix the roads."

Dan spits the pen top into his palm. "I don't have the authority to do that. Elect some Democrats in November."

The driver shrugs. "I live in the Bay Area. My vote doesn't matter."

"Your vote-" Dan feels the rage rising in his chest. It feels distant, like his body belongs to the exhausted, wrung-out, pale version of himself but his brain belongs to a different him, a him who didn't just take his fourth commercial cross-country red-eye in three weeks, a him who's slept more than three hours at a time since August, a him who can watch but do nothing to stop the rage as it boils over. "Your vote _always_ matters. It's the only thing that matters. Barack Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, but he's been ham-stringed by an opposition Congress and no support at the local level. Don't talk to me about potholes or street lamps or stop signs or whatever other fucking thing you want fixed if you don't vote."

The driver glares at him through the mirror. Slowly, he raises the privacy barrier between them.

***

"Welcome to Googleplex. How may I help you?"

"I have an appointment," Dan tells her, dropping his stack of notebooks and folders on the counter. "Dan Pfeiffer."

She smiles at him as her nails clack across the keys. "Can you spell that, please?"

Dan reaches into his pocket for his BlackBerry. The top three folders slide off his pile, spilling confidential documents across the floor. "Pfeiffer," Dan repeats as he bends to scoop them up and shove them into his messenger bag. "I'm a representative of the White House."

She hums, unimpressed. "If you could just spell your name, I can get you checked in and-"

"Dan Pfeiffer?"

Dan flinches as a hand is thrust in front of him. He leaves the pages sticking half out of his bag as he stands, pulling out his BlackBerry and ignoring the hand.

"Sorry, I never know how to-" The man pushes his hands into the pockets of his grey sweatpants, shrugging his shoulders around the thick headphones slung around his neck. "Anyway, I'm supposed to show you around. Dan Pfeiffer, right?"

"Yeah." Dan shoulders his bag, looking for too long at the man's baseball hat and the thin hoodie hanging off his hips. He raises an eyebrow and Dan covers, quickly. "Your hat."

The man takes the hat off, his curls spilling out over his forehead as he peers thoughtfully at it for a moment. "Toad," he says, then, when Dan doesn't respond, "Mario Kart," then, finally, "this is like Japanese to you, isn't it?"

"I speak Japanese."

"Of course you do." He chuckles self-deprecatingly as he shoves his hat back over his curls, pulling it low over his forehead. "I'm Lovett. I'm in charge of outreach so I'm going to show you around a little before you meet with Larry."

Dan hums over his BlackBerry, pushing, automatically, through the series of glass doors Lovett lets them through with his badge. He watches his footing in his periphery vision as he opens a series of emails Ben's forwarded him of juvenilely worded foreign policy statements from the assistant secretaries, muttering "idiots" under his breath as he reads.

"Well, the boss doesn't usually like to be insulted the first time he meets you, more of a third date kinda guy. But you work at the White House, you might get away with it." Lovett leans closer, dropping his voice performatively. "Although, if you want the scoop on some of the true idiots around here, I know all the gossip. Most of the gossip. Well-" Lovett shrugs. "I can introduce you to Ken in accounting. He knows _everybody_ and _everything_."

Dan waves his BlackBerry. "I wasn't talking to you."

"Oh." Lovett's smile slips, before he straightens his shoulders and pulls it back into place. "Well, this is my office."

It's a small cubbyhole with no windows and a glass door to belay any sense of privacy. There's a _2001: A Space Odyssey_ poster on one wall and shelves of books and cables and gaming consoles on the other. An oversized beanbag chair takes up most of the floorspace, currently occupied by a blonde dog with long, thick curls. She raises her head when they enter, wuffling softly and butting her chin against Lovett's hand.

"Hey girl," Lovett greets, his entire demeanor softening as he rubs her ears. "Feel free to leave your stuff, you're gonna give yourself scoliosis with that bag. Don't you have, like, physician consultants in the White House? Two straps, always two straps, so that when you do have back pain before you're forty it'll at least be equal-opportunity back pain."

"Our physicians are a little more focused on ACA and solving the opioid epidemic than the state of my back muscles," Dan tells him, even though it's not entirely true. There's a box of pills, carefully measured out for daily intake by the White House doctors, sitting uselessly on his dresser at home. Dan rubs absently at his chest, as he chases away the memories of an entire side of his body going numb and unresponsive. "I have confidential documents in here."

"I'll lock the door when we leave," Lovett promises. "And I'll see if Brattleby - he's our resident ergonomist - has some time to look at your spine this afternoon."

Dan drops his bag into the corner, and looks around for a coat rack before draping his trench coat over a pile of pens and a SpongeBob mug on the desk. When Dan had left DC the night before, the sky had been full of mid-October rain, but Mountain View is still clinging to the dregs of summer, and he's happy to leave the coat behind. He’d be happy to leave his coat behind forever, honestly.

He doesn't take off his suit jacket.

He doesn't leave either of his Blackberrys behind, either, although he leaves his personal phone, untouched for days and probably not even charged, in the depths of his bag.

"So, the tour?" Lovett offers as the dog slides off the beanbag, shaking herself and stretching. Her collar jingles as Lovett pulls her into his arms and she rolls onto her back, showing her belly. "This is Pundit, by the way. Don't let her fool you, she gets more attention than anyone in this building, but if you pet her she will stop glaring at you like that."

Dan shoves his hands into his pockets and steps out of the office. "Pundit?"

"Inside joke." Lovett sets her on the floor and locks his door behind them. He leads the way to a large, airy kitchen, lined with clear dispensers filled with cereals. "We count seniority here in feet from the cereal bar. I’m less than ten feet away.”

Dan snorts. "We count seniority in feet from the Oval Office."

"Sure, but, does the Oval Office have Cocoa Puffs?" Lovett grabs a bamboo cup and holds it under a tube of Cocoa Puffs, then tops it off with Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Honey Nut Cheerios. "Help yourself."

"I had a banana at the airport, I'm good."

Lovett shrugs. "Suit yourself."

Dan can feel his BlackBerry burning in his pocket, humming incessantly with a stream of emails he's going to pay for not reading later, as Lovett shows him the hall of ping pong tables, the World of Warcraft auditorium, and rows and rows of open floor plan desks piled high with Rubik's Cubes and Lego dragons and lava lamps and Simpsons action figures and very little sign of real work.

"How does anyone get anything done around here?" Dan asks, as they pause outside of a squash court-slash-spa-slash-massage parlor. Pundit runs into his calf, then steps back, shaking her head and looking up at him with wary, dark eyes.

Lovett squats down so he can pet her reassuringly. "Procrastination is like crack for creative minds, it opens the senses and strips away inhibitions."

Dan frowns at him.

"Most employees spend over eighty hours a week in this building," Lovett clarifies. "If we didn't have a place to work out we'd be even paler and softer than we already are."

Dan raises an eyebrow at him. "Is that possible?"

"Oh look," Lovett says, rubbing his palms against Pundit's cheeks, "the suit _can_ make a joke. Maybe he is human after all."

"This suit," Dan parrots, "is trying to run this shitburger of a country, so, apologies for not jumping with joy at a cereal bar or an indoor Olympic sized swimming pool when 13% of Americans don't make a living wage and children are building sandcastles on condemned lots because they don't have access to safe playgrounds."

Lovett stands and Pundit paws at his thigh until he pulls her up with him. Dan just barely holds back rolling his eyes. "I can make jokes and spend millions on public outreach at the same time. But, I forgot, you're too busy fighting with Congressional Republicans and symbolically repealing DATA to pass a clean energy bill or address any of the underlying issues facing the gay community."

"It's easy to say that when you're hiding behind a desk," Dan accuses. It feels like a funhouse mirror, throwing the campaign’s talking points back at Lovett. Dan’s been saying the same things himself, over and over again, on the campaign trail over the past six months. Calling for more action and less talk. Advocating for time on the ground, talking to real Americans about real issues. Specifying the stump speech so that it puts faces and names and details to all the people a Romney presidency would hurt. But- "But governing is hard, dirty work."

"Sure," Lovett agrees. "Hard, dirty, and at odds with what most Americans need and want."

"Most Americans," Dan recites from the very briefing book he's spent decades in politics fighting against, "don't know what they want."

"That's a cop out." Lovett stops outside a wide, glass door. "Americans want a roof over their heads, enough food on the table, and the dignity of a decent wage. They want a good education and the chance to build a better life for their children. They want politicians who can talk to them in their own language about the things they really, truly care about."

Dan wrote the response to this argument, bullet points in a meme he circulated before the campaign began. The arguments filter past his eyes, followed closely by the headache that's always threatening but now pushes insistently against his forehead. His chest aches sharply and, for the hundredth time since August, Dan pictures the resignation letter he has typed and locked in his desk, still unsigned.

"Anyway," Lovett continues, knocking on the door. "This is the boss' office. Make sure you remind him that I got you here exactly on time."

Dan nods. In his pocket, his BlackBerry bings and shakes. He pushes past his headache and opens the door.

***

The meeting with Larry Page is- fine. It goes exactly as Dan's meeting with Mark Zuckerberg went last week and with the Twitter board the week before. Dan can write their briefs for them - _[insert tech company here] is spreading information freely and objectively_ ; _technology is bringing people together for a brighter, more connected future_ ; _the only thing holding the world back from universal self-driving cars and mobile phone ownership is time_ \- and does, half-ignoring Google’s founder as he drones on about a technological manifest destiny starting in Silicon Valley and stretching out to Namibia and Laos and Venezuela, as Dan thinks about what it means for politicians to meet Americans half-way.

In 2000, it had meant farms in Iowa in kitchen tables in New Hampshire, thirty-second TV spots ‘endorsed by Al Gore’ with earnest, fair use orchestrations in the background.

In 2008, it had meant stadium speeches and campus rallies, appearances on The Daily Show and squeezing interviews with Conan O'Brien around fundraising dinners.

In 2012, it has meant Reddit AMAs and an official White House Twitter account. It has meant endless redeye flights to California to try and build a 21st century communications plan that really does reach Americans where they are. 

Dan has the outline of the plan already written up, including promises from all of the biggest tech company's founders to serve with researchers at MIT and engineers at Cal Tech to form a technological advisory board, if and when – Dan’s mind shies away, even with the polls the way they are, from _when_ until November 6th has come and gone - POTUS wins a second term.

The tech council, Dan has been assuming, will be his legacy. When he steps down from Director of Communications after the inauguration, to sleep and heal his body and find something, anything, to replenish the adrenaline he's been running on since 2007. When he hands over the reins of, and a blueprint for, a successful second Presidential term to Jenn or whoever else might succeed him.

Or, that was the plan, before Denis had slid into Dan's taxi outside of the White House and had taken the time out of the campaign to ride with him to the airport to float a job offer. Senior Advisor. To the President of the United States. Just four years ago, when Dan had been riding high off an improbable campaign and had been knocked down to earth by the offer of _Assistant_ Director of Communications, Senior Advisor had felt like a distant pipe dream at the center of a whirlpool he’d never reach.

Now, he's just tired. Now, he cares more about beating Congressional Republicans to a news cycle than he does about what's in that news cycle. Now, he’s so tempted to turn it down in favor of Mai Thais on a beach in Indonesia.

Now, he wants more than anything for Denis to take it back.

***

"It was so nice to meet with you." Larry stands from his ball-chair and opens the door. "Please, tell POTUS I am thrilled to be a part of this."

"Thank you, sir." Dan takes the hand when it's offered.

"Please, Larry." He smiles when he looks into the hallway. "Good, Lovett, you'll make sure Dan gets the full Google experience before his flight back to DC?"

"Of course." Lovett pushes away from the wall, still typing on his phone. At his feet, Pundit rolls her neck but doesn't get up. "Hungry?"

The last meal Dan ate before the banana was half a tuna salad wrap at National, and his stomach growls just thinking about it. "Yeah, food would be good."

Lovett leads him to the cantina - "take anything you want, it's on the house" - and piles his tray high with sushi, a spicy chicken sandwich, a small bowl of fettuccini, and a sprinkle donut. Dan grabs an apple, a shrink-wrapped sandwich, the largest coffee he can find, and raises a judgmental eyebrow at Lovett’s tray.

They sit outside under multi-colored umbrellas, surrounded by Android statues in the shapes of a KitKat bar, a half-eaten ice cream sandwich, gingerbread, honeycomb. Pundit lies forlornly at their feet, more focused on the food Lovett isn't feeding her than the employees riding by on scooters and wheeled-sneakers.

"So," Lovett says, after he's bitten a piece of sushi off his chopsticks, "what I said before your meeting-"

"It's okay," Dan interrupts. His headache is feeling better in the fresh air, but it still pierces behind his eyes. "No need to apologize."

Lovett drops his wrist, letting his chopsticks trail against the table. "I wasn't going to apologize."

"Oh." Dan flushes, surprised out of his headache and Denis' voice running round and round in his mind. "Sorry, I-" He chuckles, shaking his head. "Been a long time since someone's disagreed with me."

Lovett points a chopstick at him. "Also, I was right."

"You were," Dan agrees. "Mostly."

"Take San Francisco,” Lovett grins smugly, ignoring the second half of Dan’s statement. He picks up another piece of sushi but doesn’t eat it. “San Francisco’s great. I can get chicken biryani and moo shoo pork at all hours of the day. There’s a Mosque at the end of my block across from a Temple that rents out its basement space every Wednesday night for a Wiccan séance. It’s great. And you know why? Cause San Francisco had the very first Chinatown and has, for as long as its history, been a home to immigrants from all over the world. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, etc. etc.”

“Sure,” Dan agrees, as he unwraps his sandwich. “If you want to gloss over two hundred years of history.”

“But last year, there were 2,000 eviction notices. _2,000_. Last year _alone_. And they weren’t in the Valley.” His sushi finally slides out of his chopsticks and Pundit leans onto the bench next to Dan to grab it. “They were in Chinatown. They were in the Mission. People can’t afford to live here anymore. Over the last two years, 85% of new construction in town has been for luxury condos. _85 percent_. We can’t get 85% of people to buy a $10 cover for their $800 cell phones.”

Dan glances down at his BlackBerry. He has twelve missed calls and over 300 new emails.

“BlackBerrys don’t count,” Lovett scoffs. “No one owns a BlackBerry anymore.”

“Make Android more secure– wait, I take that back, make Android secure _at all_ and the government might consider it.”

“Are you offering me a contract?” Lovett tilts his head. “We can make Android more secure. There are reasons why we don’t.”

Dan leans forward. “Which are?”

“Nah uh, I’m not that easy.” Lovett waves his chopsticks again, then grabs a piece of sushi and bites half of it. He offers Pundit the other half. “Anyway, who’s living in those luxury high rises? Certainly not the twenty-two-year-old mother of three who came here from Mexico to build a better life for her family.”

“People like you,” Dan offers. “People who make a quarter of a million dollars a year to play video games all day.”

Lovett snorts. “And you live in a six-hundred dollar a month basement apartment in Roger’s Park?”

Dan stays quiet, thinking about the newly-renovated apartment in Georgetown that he’d bought in cash and rarely ever gets to see.

“Figures.” Lovett nods his head at a tall guy a few tables over, dressed in a striped-shirt and plaid shorts. “That guy over there. His name’s Kevin and he works in Chrome troubleshooting. He lives in a van in the parking lot. Takes showers in the gym. Eats all his meals in the cantina.”

“Is that legal?”

Lovett shrugs. “It’s not officially against the code of conduct.”

Dan takes a bite of his sandwich. It’s fresh and his stomach growls. Pundit’s collar jingles as she turns to look at him.

“So, there’s a Proposition on the ballot in November that will end no fault evictions from owners who say they’re going to leave the rental market but really just want to renovate with luxury condos.” Lovett puts down his chopsticks and reaches for the donut. “If it passes, it’ll cut evictions by, conservatively, 30%.”

Dan stares at him. He flips through the ballot measures in his head, but he’s been too busy to read fully through the monitoring report in weeks.

“Anyway,’ Lovett says, as he goes back to picking at his donut, “those are the sorts of things you should be talking about on the campaign trail.”

“You-” Dan swallows, unable to look away as Lovett wipes of a piece of frosting from the corner of his mouth. “You know a lot about political messaging.” 

“I worked in politics for a bit,” Lovett says, flushing a little as he ducks his chin. “In ’08. Wrote some jokes about Barbara Walters for Hillary Clinton. For a roast that never actually happened.”

“You didn’t want to pursue it further?” Dan asks, thinking back to that first campaign in Tennessee, about what his life would look like, now, if he’d turned around and found another dream. A wife, maybe, with two kids and a picket fence and a spotted dog. Or, maybe, at least he would have had the time to think about and reject that pre-set Lego version of his life. “You talk like a politician who can speak to the people. We could have used you in ’08.”

Lovett finishes the donut and wipes his hand on a napkin, quiet for an awkward number of moments before he asks, “You cool to play hooky for the rest of the afternoon?”

Dan glances at the time on his Blackberry and ignores the blinking red light showering him with messages. “The car’s coming to pick me up in an hour.”

Lovett waves him away, standing to clean up his tray and refill his Diet Coke. “If we miss it, I’ll drive you.”

***

Dan’s regretting his decision to take Lovett up on the ride as he careens his Jeep into the Santa Clara Community Center parking lot. Dan had frowned, skeptically, at the side mirror hanging precariously by a strip of duct tape when he got in, but he’s intimately acquainted, now, with how Lovett handwaves stop signs and drives with one hand on the wheel and the other on Pundit’s neck. 

The Jeep jerks to a stop and Dan climbs out, looking up from his BlackBerry just long enough to stretch his shaking legs and note the yellowing palm trees lining the building’s entrance. He looks back at his phone and the endless series of emails from his staff. Jon’s sent the draft of the Texas speech with the subject line ‘POTUS wants feedback by 6pm.’ Dan glances at his watch; it’s already 6:30 in DC.

Denis has just sent the subject line ‘thoughts on what we discussed?’ with nothing in the body.

Lovett smiles at the receptionist as he points at Dan. “He’s with me.” He leans closer, faux dropping his voice. “He works at the White House, with top secret level security clearance, so I’m not worried.”

She chuckles and lets them through.

“I have higher than secret level security clearance,” Dan tells him, as he thumbs open the speech and almost doesn’t hold the door open long enough for Pundit to squeeze through.

“Language of the people,” Lovett reminds him.

Dan hums as he reads the first paragraph of the adapted stump speech. Then he pauses, scrolls back up, and reads it again in Lovett’s tone. He frowns and closes out, typing back ‘we’ve lost the thread. more colloquialisms, less soaring,” before sliding his phone into his pocket.

“Fuck it’s hot in here,” Lovett complains as he holds open the doors to the gym and ushers Dan inside.

It’s a typical community center gym, filled with the squeaking of sneakers and the hollow sound of bouncing basketballs. Dan catches a ball that flies past his head as they enter, bouncing it a few times subconsciously before tosses it back to a young, pig-tailed girl with thick glasses, a red Google t-shirt, and sneakers decked out in rainbow Google laces and soles. 

“Sorry mister,” she calls, flushing a little as she doesn’t catch his throw and instead chases after it.

“None of that,” Lovett calls after her. “We don’t ‘mister’ around here, remember? It makes me feel old.”

“You are old Mr. Lovett.”

“Just for that,” Lovett warns her, “I’m putting you on a team with Brad.”

Her mouth falls open as her cheekbones flush even darker. The ball bounces clumsily to the floor. “You wouldn’t do that.”

Lovett hums at her. “Think about the consequences before you insult someone next time. I’m not saying don’t do it, just, make an informed decision, that’s all I ask of you.”

She sticks out her tongue but before she can retort she sees Pundit and squeals, dropping onto her knees and wiggling her fingers into Pundit’s fur. Lovett whispers, “she’s got a thing for Brad,” to Dan out of the corner of his mouth before waving everyone over.

“Okay, monsters, gather around,” Lovett calls and the gym falls silent as the children gather around him. “Coach Hiddly is out of town this week, so you’re just going to have to deal with me.”

The room splits into cheers and groans.

“Yeah, that’s right. Polarizing. That should be my catch phrase.” Lovett chuckles. “But I’ve brought back-up. This is Dan. He works for the government, so don’t mess with him or he might bug your house.”

Dan splutters, “The government doesn’t do that.”

“Good cop, bad cop,” Lovett mutters out of the side of his mouth and it surprises a laugh from Dan. “Anyway, he’ll be coaching the red team. Don’t do anything to him that you wouldn’t do to me.”

Fifteen small heads nod and smirk. Dan shivers.

“Okay, good talk. Do-” Lovett waves his hand. “- whatever you do as a warm up, then let’s play. Winners get to dump Dan in water. Also, they get ice cream.”

The kids cheer.

Dan knows what Lovett is doing here. Dan knows he’s showing off, making a point about Silicon Valley in general and Google in particular. Dan knows he shouldn’t be falling for it, but he hasn’t played much basketball since the doctors put him on blood thinners and a cocktail of other daily pills. He hasn’t even been to a Wizards games since re-election started, and he’s forgotten, somehow, how everything else floats away when he’s on the court, the ball fitting so comfortingly in his hands.

He feels a tug at his pants pocket and looks down.

“Mr. Dan?” The girl from before shakes her pigtails. “Can you dunk?”

“Not in a while,” Dan admits, “not really ever. But, try and try and keep trying, my coaches always said. So, let’s try, shall we?”

She nods, biting her lip, and Dan takes off his suit jacket, rolls up his sleeves, and fails spectacularly at reaching the rim.

She laughs. His entire team laughs. He hasn’t felt this alive in months. “Huddle around,” he calls to them and then leans into the circle of bright, shining faces. “Lovett’s team is going down, yeah? Because I don’t know about all of you, but I’d really like some ice cream.”

His team cheers.

Lovett catches his eye from the other huddle.

Dan’s heart thumps, from the exertion, from the smiling faces, from the sound of basketballs echoing throughout the gym, from the way Lovett winks, exaggerated and loose, under his hat.

***

“I’m pretty sure,” Lovett tells him, “that you cheated.”

Dan raises an eyebrow at him. Dan’s team won, but it was a close thing, and he’d ended up playing both coach and referee after Lovett missed travelling calls three times in a row - “what? I don’t even know what that is” – and Dan wrestled the whistle away from him.

“Pretty sure?” Dan asks. “If you knew even, like, half the rules, you might know for sure.”

“That’s what I forgot to do in high school.” Lovett snaps his figures. “Pay attention to the rules of the game before the men’s basketball team tried to dunk _me_ into that dumpster.”

Dan opens his mouth-

“Don’t look at me like that,” Lovett waves him away. “I work at Google, I turned out just fine.”

-and laughs.

Lovett grins and hands him three giant boxes of ice cream sandwiches to pass out to both teams. They disappear in an instant but, after Lovett’s made sure that all the kids have one, he grabs the last two and sits next to Dan on the bleachers, close enough for their knees to bump.

“I know what you're doing here,” Dan says, as he fights with his wrapper and tries not to notice the way ice cream is already dripping down Lovett’s wrist. He parrots back everything he’s heard in his trips to Silicon Valley over the past few weeks. “The tech companies get too many tax breaks, but they invest it back into our communities.”

“I didn't bring you here to prove that we're doing good work with our privileges,” Lovett glares. “I don't work in tech because Google spends a small percentage of its profits on helping underserved kids, that's stupid. This is just good PR.”

Dan looks away, from the way Lovett talks with his hands when he's making a point, from the way Lovett keeps surprising him, breaking through his jaded edges over and over again.

“I moved to tech because I didn't get a speechwriting job,” Lovett laughs at himself. “and I brought you here as a reminder of the auspicious responsibilities tech companies have. Google and Facebook and Twitter are the biggest forces in our social and political lives and we're at a turning point moment. If we don't do this right, we're going to be paying $10 a month for the privilege of not using Bing. And not long after that we’re going to have to resuscitate the Pony Express in order to plan protests and sit-ins and union meetings. I don’t know about you, but horses have never liked me much.”

Dan swallows. “Dark.”

“Realistic.” Lovett shrugs, balling up his empty wrapper and licking ice cream off his fingers. “I don’t know why I brought you here. I just thought-” He waves his hands towards the kids. “I don’t know. I just know that we’re at this big, important moment and I want to a part of it so that, hopefully, it can tip the right way.”

“Yeah.” Dan swallows as he thinks about the email from Denis and the inadequate plan he's mostly written already. “Yeah, me too.”

Lovett slaps his knees, grinning as he stands up. “I’d better get you to the airport, rush hour is all hours in the Valley.”

***

Lovett was right about rush hour. They inch toward the airport in bumper to bumper traffic and, if Dan's flight hadn't been delayed, he'd have missed it by a full twenty minutes.

Instead, he races through security with his diplomatic passport and finds a table at the closest bar, ordering a pint and pulling out his laptop. He elbows the woman on the stool next to him, apologizing absently to her as he pulls up the plan he's been working on.

It's simple. Small. A few ideas on how they can build a better healthcare.gov and create a better process for procuring official government Twitter accounts.

His phone buzzes with an alert. Another hour delay. Weather in the Midwest that’s wreaking havoc on air traffic control.

Dan orders a second beer and deletes everything in his document. He types out _Proposal for a Technology Council with an Emphasis on Digital Citizenship_ and starts writing.

He's not sure how much time passes as he writes the most progressive memo he’s conceived of since joining POTUS’ staff, but next time he looks up, his flight is delayed past midnight.

He bites his lip as he does one last read through of the memo, tapping the business card Lovett left him against the table to punctuate the words in his head. He finishes, attaches it to Denis’ email, then pulls up the United website to fine the number for customer service.

He continues flipping the business card through his fingers, then pauses, frowning at it. He switches over to Google, typing in Lovett’s name.

_Chief Speechwriter for Hillary Clinton Leaves for Silicon Valley_

_Clinton Wordsmith Quits Politics_

_Google Taps Ex-Clinton Speechwriter to Lead Community Outreach_

Dan sends Alyssa an email - ‘stuck in SF, will take first flight back tomorrow’ - and calls for a cab.

***

“Wrote a ‘few Barbara Walters jokes’?” Dan asks, raising his hands to make air quotes, when Lovett opens the front door of his small, first-floor walkup in the Mission. He’s wearing a cat t-shirt and Abraham Lincoln boxers and Pundit noses at his bare knees, peering around him and up at Dan.

“Among other things,” Lovett shrugs. He shivers, a little, his skin goose-bumping in the chilled air now that the sun has gone down. He’s wearing glasses and his curls are mussed. “What are you doing here?”

“My flight was delayed.” Dan adjusts his messenger bag, filled with briefing books and nothing he’ll need for a night at the airport, more comfortably over his shoulder. 

“And you came here?” Lovett asks, but he steps aside, ushering Dan in. “This is why I left politics. If you stay in it too long, you put your mind down and forget where you put it.”

Dan steps in, just far enough for the door to close behind him. Pundit stretches, then bumps her head against his knee. He finally gives in, dropping his bag and scratching her head as he takes a deep breath. “I have a proposition.”

Lovett raises an eyebrow.

“I’m recommending that the President starts a technology council on digital citizenship,” Dan barrels ahead, swallowing around the picture Lovett’s painting, standing on the edges of his bare feet and shirt riding up a little above his boxers. “And I need your help.”

Lovett nods. “I can talk to Larry, lay a little groundwork, although I can’t imagine he’s going to turn down an offer to advise the President.”

“Not Larry,” Dan corrects, quickly. “I mean, yes, Larry, on the larger council. But I want- well, I want you to lead it. With me.”

Lovett’s feet fall flat onto the floor and he pushes a curl behind his ear. “Me?”

“You.” Dan shrugs. “I’ve spent the last few weeks flying back and forth from DC to Silicon Valley, and you’re the first person to push me on digital citizenship. If I want to do this - and I _do_ want to do this - I need you to keep me honest.”

Lovett bites his lip but it doesn’t hold back the grin that stretches dimples across his upper lip. “I’d fight with you-”

“Good.”

“-all the time,” he warns. “I’m not a ‘yes’ man.”

“I know.” Dan takes a step closer. “I want you to push me.”

Lovett raises an eyebrow but Dan swallows his next retort, stepping forward and pressing Lovett into the wall. Lovett scrambles at his shoulders, taking only a moment to right himself and press forward, opening his mouth and pulling Dan closer and closer and closer, until Dan’s forgotten all about Denis’ offer and the reelection campaign and how weak Larry Page’s handshake is.

Lovett doesn’t pull back until Pundit presses between them, sitting on Lovett’s bare toes and whining briefly. Lovett rocks back on his heels, offering, quietly, “she isn’t used to strangers.”

Dan feels a rush of heat in his chest, his heart beating wildly where he’s only felt the chill of stroke-like-symptoms in recent months. “I’m not, ahh, used to kissing strangers, either.”

Lovett chuckles, reaching down to squeeze Dan’s hand where it’s hovering an inch or so from above his hips. “This isn’t going to make me go any easier on you in the Council.”

“I’d sure hope not.”

“Okay.” Lovett arches upwards, tangling his fingers in the short bristles at the back of Dan’s neck as Dan drops his head to kiss along Lovett’s jawline. “Now that we’ve got that settled, bedroom?”

“Yeah,” Dan whispers into Lovett’s skin, not looking up as Lovett walks them backwards, down the hall.

He trips over the five Starburst-colored pairs of sneakers scattered across his front hallway, before he pulls away just long enough to get to his bedroom and close the door with Pundit’s judgmental eyes on the other side.

“Your dog is growing on me,” Dan tells him, as he toes off his dress shoes and starts unbuttoning his shirt.

“My dog is an angel,” Lovett bites back, slapping at Dan’s hands and making short work of his shirt buttons. “But she can wait thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes?” Dan raises an eyebrow. He loosens his tie so that it falls with his shirt when Lovett pushes it to the floor.

“Give or take.” Lovett shrugs as he reaches for Dan’s belt and slides it out of his belt loops, running the leather through his fingers as he lets it drop to the floor.

Dan groans, reaching for Lovett’s hips and pushing him back towards the bed. Lovett falls to the mattress, laughing a little as Dan grabs at the hem of his shirt and shakes his head, asking “Schrodinger’s cat?” as he lifts it over Lovett’s head.

“Clever,” Lovett argues, breathlessly.

“Nerdy,” Dan argues, as he kisses the path of Lovett’s flush, stretching pink and warm and soft from his collarbone down the trail of hair that disappears into his boxers. “In a blindingly hot kind of way.

Lovett spreads his knees, his head falling back against the pillows as he twists his fingers into Dan’s hair. “It’s always, fuck, the serious, angry ones you have to watch out for.”

“Not angry,” Dan argues, as he bites down on Lovett’s left nipple and Lovett bows under him. His erection brushes against Dan’s hip and it’s been so long since Dan’s felt another body under him, he can’t hold back the long, embarrassing groan he breathes into Lovett’s chest. “Just been a long few weeks. Months, really.”

“I remember,” Lovett whispers, pulling Dan up to kiss him. Dan catches himself on his hand and bends his head, sucking Lovett’s bottom lip between his teeth. Lovett kisses like he talks, quick and fast, with stops and starts when he thinks he’s pushed too far, teasing with his tongue and pulling back, testing, pulling, gauging Dan’s reactions and making hair-pinned turns that keep Dan on his metaphorical and literal toes.

Dan’s arm shakes with the effort to keep himself upright, one-handed, as he trails he free hand down Lovett’s trembling chest, over the soft skin of his stomach, before dipping into his boxers.

Lovett keens, raising his knees around Dan’s hips, boxing him in. His dick strains, hot and heavy in Dan’s palm. “I remember what it was like. Long nights in the campaign office. Long days-” he gasps, his hips meeting Dan’s fist, setting a rhythm that’s so fast and so hot that Dan has to rush to keep up. “-watching the candidate kiss babies and eat cherry pie and discuss ‘kitchen table’ issues around actual kitchen tables.”

“You,” Dan mutters, sliding his tongue against Lovett’s for a long moment, “are way too coherent.”

Lovett lifts his hips, pressing against Dan’s suit pants, “is that a challenge?”

“For me,” Dan promises. Lovett leaps in his hand as Dan pulls away from his mouth, sliding down the mattress to settle between his legs. His shoulders force Lovett’s knees even wider.

“Fuck,” Lovett murmurs, biting into his bicep as Dan urges his hips up, just long enough to discard his boxers. He wraps his first around Lovett, pumping a few times as Lovett swears and lifts his ankle to press into Dan’s shoulder blades, pushing him closer.

Lovett jumps against his tongue. He tastes like soap and sweat and heat and he grows impossibly harder in Dan’s mouth. Dan sucks in his cheeks, humming contentedly around Lovett, tracing the thick, purple vein on the underside of his dick, before pulling back to press his tongue to the leaking tip.

Lovett’s hips fall back to the mattress. “When I woke up this morning, I never imagined-” He starts, until Dan takes him back in in one motion, and he whimpers, his ankle digging painfully into Dan’s shoulder. “Fuck, shit, Dan-”

Dan flexes in his suit pants, leaking desperately into his boxers as he ruts against the mattress with the same rhythm as his tongue.

“I’m gonna- fuck, Dan, if you don’t stop-” Lovett tugs at his ears, his hips moving frantically, fast and hard and Dan loosens his throat, swallows Lovett down as he comes on a groan, thrusting his hips into Dan’s mouth and holding himself there for a long, pulsing moment, before falling back to the mattress with a sigh. “Fuck, that was good.”

Dan pulls off, sliding his tongue along the underside of Lovett’s dick slowly as it softens and curls into the crease of his thigh. 

“Come here,” Lovett mutters, pulling at Dan’s shoulders and kissing him, loose and wet, gasping for breath against Dan’s mouth. He pushes ineffectually at Dan’s slacks, until Dan unbuttons them and pushes them to the floor with his boxers.

“Fuck,” Dan groans as he settles against Lovett’s hip, thrusting a few times into the warm divot of skin. “Lovett.”

“Yeah,” Lovett urges him on, pressing his heels into the back of Dan’s thighs and reaching down to rub his thumb over the tip of Dan’s leaking cock. “Fuck, Dan, making you fall apart like this- if I could get it up again I would. I swear I-” 

Dan’s hips stutter as Lovett’s fingers slip and slide around him.

“Fuck, yeah,” Lovett whispers, “come for me.”

Dan gasps into Lovett’s mouth, feeling the pressure build in the tops of his thighs. He tries to tighten his lips against Lovett’s for a kiss, but he’s pretty sure he fails as Lovett presses with his heel and his thumb and Dan shakes into the hollow of Lovett’s hip.

Lovett eases him through it, his fingers keyboard-calloused and warm against Dan’s spine, as he presses a kiss behind Dan’s ear. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Dan murmurs, as he rolls onto his side. “That was-”

“Good,” Lovett supplies. “Really fucking great, actually.”

“Yeah.” Dan grins, dropping his chin and trailing his finger up the inside of Lovett’s thigh. “For me, too.”

Lovett groans, but reaches over to grab a bottle of Diet Coke from his bedside table. It fizzes weakly as the cap clicks open. “So, I’ll, ahhh, be in DC for a few weeks. We can meet up about the Council and-” he catches Dan’s eyes, then flicks his gaze away. “Not that- this can be a one-time thing. That’s cool, too. Not that I normally invite strangers into my bed on the day I meet them. I’m not-” He swallows. “Please, don’t let me keep talking.”

Dan chuckles, sitting up against the headboard and leaning across Lovett, noting Lovett’s sharp intake of breath, so he can snatch Lovett’s phone from his bedside table. Dan stabs his fingers across the keys, staring at the sequence of dots that appears. “That would have been smooth,” he promises, “if your fucking phones weren’t so user unfriendly.”

"That's our new slogan. 'Want the most unfriendly phone? Choose Android.'" Lovett laughs a little desperately as he reaches for the phone and swipes in a complicated series of directions.

"Catchy." Dan takes the phone back. "Might just work, too. Honesty, the Google way."

Lovett snorts.

Dan finds Lovett’s contacts and adds the information for his personal phone. The phone only his parents and Bob and Alyssa ever contact him on anymore. He hands it back. “Call me, when you’re in town.”

Lovett takes his phone, peering at it critically, like, maybe, Dan's purposefully left off a digit or something. "Yeah?"

"Please." Dan reaches for the phone again, shutting it off and putting it aside before pulling Lovett to straddle his hips. "I don't invite just anyone to join Presidential Councils.”

Lovett laughs, shaking his head, his curls wild and sweaty across his forehead. “Proof suggests otherwise,” he argues, as he drops his head to meet Dan halfway for a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [ tumblr](http://stainyourhands.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
